


Latin Root: Pati

by samarqand



Category: Daredevil (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Breathplay, Catholic Character, Catholic Guilt, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Police Brutality, Prison, Sexual Content, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 01:08:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/742332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samarqand/pseuds/samarqand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Based after Ed Brubaker's 'Devil in Cell Block D' arc of Daredevil.)   Matt begins to remember the finer points of his time in Ryker's.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Latin Root: Pati

**GENPOP.**

 

Nutraloaf. 

The smell of it screams through his airways. Bile kicks in to clog his body from blunt trauma. His eyes burn in squeamish sympathy, two bleeding hearts for his lungs. 

He closes them.

The gag reflex is suppressed with a grimace; smiling is the best cure for an upset stomach. His father had taught him that, years of dirty fighters in the ring and the odd ragtag brawl gaining him some bare-boned wisdom. As a boy, Matt failed to learn quite as well how to tolerate the terrible sensation of vomiting. 

He became an adult and now he finds it unbearable. 

He lurches to smash his back, with more force than needed, against his cell’s dank brick wall. He pushes the heels of his palms into his eye sockets.

The pulpy mass travels through Cell Block D, cobbled into something like meatloaf and sliced mercifully thin for quick consumption. The loaf tastes like nothing when it’s cooked right, rumor had it. And that’s the worst part of it, you’d hear inmates chuffing around their sand-colored spaghetti sauce and potatoes: all that nightmarish anticipation, unconsummated.

Some stranger far down from his cell, another country, another level of assault, mutters a string of curses, but he sight of the orange-toned mess shoved in around the industrial-grade metal of his segregation cell has already subdued him to disappointment. 

“And this is how you take your swing at me,” wonders the convict in a tobacco-thickened grunt. “Of all the cruel and unusual bullshit.”

Matt’s breathing goes shallow. He imagines clawing his way out of Ryker’s, into fragrant wet soil, or deeper into the complex — another corridor, another neighbor with better behavior that wouldn’t warrant punishment by nutraloaf.

Hypotheticals. He fixates on the smell of his own hypothetical blood drawn from scrabbling fingers, a scent easy to conjure. He makes memos to himself and takes mechanical inventory of the slim pickings in the next block cell over: couple of stoop kids with snowballed records, Reds out of Alphabet City settling down to colonize Block C, and Armenian do-rags waging a down-low war against the Reds for dibs.

The thirsty prison guards had not spared a thought for spacing the gangs, nor for keeping tabs on gang business in the corridors, in the yard, in the dining area; kindred spirits clumped together quickly during lunch and whenever they managed to bust out after lights. Disenfranchised young men seeking validation in the few claustrophobic spaces that mattered.

Sometimes they’d break through Matt’s singular focus, swooping in during rec hour as a gaggle of grinning sideshows vying for top insult.

The ones with the toned, well-loved muscles, and penchant for tattoos — they like shouting at Frank Castle. They stoop to examine Frank’s distractions — his writing or reading or his muted surveillance of the yard — and choke out some threatening puns, heady with reassurance ever since the surreal moment when they realized they had Bullseye, Daredevil, and the Punisher locked away just as they were, and Bullseye, Daredevil, and the Punisher were just as they were. 

They all clapped their hands over this epiphany still, and smacked each other’s shoulders when they swapped stories again and again in evermore blazing detail. One day Bullseye rolled on in, shackled and hopeless -- did he spit through his restraints? Some swore he did, but the force of it only bruised a corrections officer’s cheek. Then the dumbstriking moment when Matt Murdock had stilled the Punisher’s hand with no more than a word, and how suddenly the show was up for grabs. 

Ryker’s is caught now in a great upset, a perpetually collapsing domino disaster, and even the Kingpin has no chance of governing all of genpop.

And Matt Murdock with his insides emptied out.

And Frank Castle counting down until dark.

For the past two days, Frank has methodically collected and tucked away Ryker’s stark amenities: extra saltines, another toothbrush, toilet tissue paper. He has obediently kept to himself, has proven himself an attentive reader of his little paperback, and the book’s title is a question sitting in the back of Matt’s throat, stifled by his mania, his misery. 

He thinks of Frank here, mild and watchful, and it gives him an uneasy impression of matters unexplained to him, but he has no spirit to call them forth into words.

Frank has hidden his small victories. 

He has kept himself a sketch on the outskirts of the roiling masses. He has used himself thinly.

By three PM on a Wednesday, he has managed to gain a whole loaf of that mottled mixture for himself, and in his cell he stows it out of sight after only a moment’s hesitation.

“Things break,” Frank tells Matt one night, after they have escaped their bone-breaker netting and have tiptoed through the wreckage. 

In this hour, it could be anything. It could be the laundry room folding tables, caught up in the chaos. It could be one of Frank’s toes in his canvas sneakers. It could be some fugitive keepsake Matt had managed to smuggle inside, unbeknownst to all but Frank. It could be a thing already shattered, grinding down to dust.

Nobody’s telling anyone anything anymore.

 

+

 

Clockwork. 

After lights, the bodies rise from their roosts and walk like the living dead, cackling gravely into each other’s cells, exchanging contraband or threats. 

Frank appears to join the swap-meet, a silhouette shuttering across the edge of small cabals and each transient epicenter of action throughout the hall, an unseen flaw in their plans. 

When he finally stops, he opens Matt’s cell door.

Wordlessly, he offers Matt a surgical mask, which Matt dumbly grabs and straps on as he pushes on Frank’s shoulder to move him; he sweeps out of his cell toward tonight’s to-do’s, where the smell of nutraloaf and disinfectant will drift drearily on the stale air for another hour and a half. The flimsy mask works to a small extent that, in his single-minded struggle to defeat what has destroyed him, sustains his movement through genpop.

He sucks in a breath of air.

He smacks his palm against his forehead to dull his senses. 

He wakes up tucked under soft covers, a misplaced thing.

 

+

 

These half-lived moments escape from a phantom corridor. They arrive in wordless pangs, the memory of misery. 

Matt calls them dreams, and considers fatigue or stress their mother. 

Ryker’s Island with its whistling wind, Cell Block D, and Frank Castle. 

Frank Castle, Frank’s nameless paperback, Matt drawing blood in frenzied blows. Blood drawn, inmates shuddering through half-medicated or worry-worn dazes when the lights whisk off. The illusion of safety in numbers, and how Matt tore illusion down, how he became the nightmare. The sleeplessness.

He dreams now, maybe, of that sleeplessness. Those unclaimed nights return to him and demand recompense.

Daytime: he throws himself into work. These days, he almost petulantly pulls on his bright demeanor, and puts a debonair twist on a ‘good morning.’

A former client, an old woman with a young smile, stops in to say hello and ask if he is a superhero.

They laugh about it. The old woman remarks on Matt’s unassailable gumption.

Foggy emerges from his corner of the woodwork. He feels compelled to make himself heard now as Matt’s counterpoint.

“Aha, uh,” he chimes in, “legal culture finally caught up with him.”

Back then, back in my dreams, you had become only the moment the pulse drops off into unforgiving silence, Matt wants to tell Foggy. The sound of my failing you; that is what struck me down. That is what undoes a protector. 

Foggy will never know this, and sometimes this is a good thing, and sometimes it sits between them like a pit Matt dug himself. Foggy shuffling in and out while his old client makes gentle conversation: he’s armed with post-it notes filled with important scribbles that he dabs onto shelves and tables, wherever he finds space. Sometimes he looks over at Matt and smiles or gives him a puzzled look. Whatever he feels like.

Matt thinks: There was the extent of my faith back then. Faith that I could restore humanity where you had found none. I could at least pretend, in your name, that justice would be served.

Foggy inhales in a measured, discreet intake of air, and shifts his weight steadily from one foot to another while he jots down something essential.

Foggy worries. Matt feels some great sense of defeat, having been the one to conjure the triangle between himself, Foggy, and their newborn habits of telling the other everything they would prefer not to hear. 

Responsibility for the look on someone’s face is daunting.

Once, emptiness served as Matt’s substitute in the moments between his imprisonment and Danny Rand’s helpful homage to the symbol, Daredevil. 

There is no one to say if absence had known how to care better.

When the old woman rises to leave, her wedding band, a grand old-fashioned diamond ring, clinks against the desk and has the final word.

(Milla’s voice edged frantic for him, warping behind the non-contact glass. 

Her new wedding ring a bright crack against that threshold when she gave in and smacked her hand against it in the most honest expression of agony she could find.

The exact count of steps between his and Wilson Fisk’s.

A precise schedule, down to bathroom breaks and eating pace, of his targets.

How many seconds it takes to pass invisibly through a cell block.)

These facts inhabited Matt’s body in his self’s absence.

He does not remember displaying the soles of his bare feet for the wardens. He does not remember shucking off the coarse orange jumpsuit in the frozen nights, save for its unforgiving rasp against skin.

He remembers Frank with a paper cup tipping full of water, and wondering, why?

He had surpassed accountability for his body. He remembers heaviness he tried to smash through, and was it in his chest or in his throat.

Sometime around June he dreams of a young man with sick rings around his eyes, slack-jawed and hunted. He hunches with abashed attempts at anonymity that Matt batters past. He could be just about everyone else inhabiting genpop.

His bony hands thrust urgently at Matt to ward him off; fading calluses snag on Matt’s scratchy uniform. ”Hey, I’m on my own, I ain’t — you could run this place, you got everyone freaked,” he hisses beseechingly. His hands are flighty; he doesn’t like to touch. He has smoked himself out of his own skin so many times he cannot wear it right anymore. He is harmless.

“I’m scared a you, Murdock. Truth. Don’t you go thinkin’ I got anythin’ but respect for ya — “

How old is he? Twenty-four? Quick introductions to the block say he got caught red-handed by a bitter cop on Mother’s Day years back, and could not navigate prison’s complexity; it swept him clean off his feet. Now he occasionally serves as Fisk’s man Friday, though in this moment, he shakes his head fervently and breathes the Lord’s name in vain like any other grunt who has drawn too much attention to himself.

“I been locked up before. I know who’s the big-wig. It’s you. You’re the boss.”

Matt overwhelms the shuddering convict and opens his mouth to ask his questions.

But: “You never been in, Mr. Murdock. You don’t know what it’s like. So, and, you gotta understand me. I hadta do what I hafdta, ‘cause... It’s those cravings that’ll make you go fucknuts in here. I never wanted for shit before, but now I can’t — I hadta do somethin’ for it.”

“Should’ve kept your head down,” Matt tells him. His voice registers low, almost inaudible. 

The messenger breaks out into a sweat at the sound of it.

“Just — I couldn’t, can’t go through that shit again. I’d — that’s why I do what I hafta. The Kingpin promises you an out, you believe him with every fuckin’ fiber. ‘Cause you gotta just try and imagine what it feels like, Mr. Murdock, when you been cooped in here and you been kicked to hell and back. You go insane dreamin’ of what you left on the outside.”

He honest-to-God raises one hand to still Matt. He needs to say his piece, because no one will ask him anything anymore, and he will grasp at what scraps he can. His trembling mouth moves fruitlessly before he learns again how to express himself.

“I don’t mean stupid things I want. You stop dreamin’ of girls, or. Ask anyone and it’s same story, life here kills it off. You stop ‘membering what wantin’ another person is like after a while. It’s not — that’s sad, but it’s not that that gets you. 

“But the truth, it’s — warm bread. And real butter. It.” He inhales until he can’t inhale anymore. “Just the, that simplest thing you don’t have. You stop dreaming ‘bout girls, but they’ll never let you… they’ll never let you stop dreaming of eating bread with butter. Never.”

He scrunches up his face into something small. “I had t’take my chances. I’ll go crazy if I start havin’ those dreams again.”

“Crazy,” Matt echoes. He subdues his target and finds another.

And he wakes up. 

He coughs when he tastes the insinuation of blood just behind his tongue: his nose is bleeding.

“Crazy.” He tries the word in his own voice. He practices pressing sleepy darkness into his eye sockets with the heel of his palms. 

They aren’t dreams. 

He realizes, crashing his own towering barricades, that he is finally remembering.

Toilet paper stuffed up a nostril, he blankly strips down and grabs his costume; he hovers at his window and musters enough gumption to pull on his costume and fasten his belt, before his arms heavily swing down to rest at his sides and he lets his cowl drop to the floor like a deflated balloon. 

The costume feels too big tonight. It feels like someone else’s.

He lets the wind roll in and waits to stop leaking.

 

+

 

He can’t recall words.

He recalls Frank’s stockpiled amenities. The vile nutraloaf hiding amongst colorless necessities, its occasional ambush of Matt’s senses the only insinuation of Frank’s plans.

The taste of that dense mess is not the sinker. The smell is the only hurdle.

What makes nutraloaf useful to a pragmatist like Frank is the way it suppresses the appetite after only a few bites.

It sits heavy in the pit of the stomach.

Matt rolls over and presses his face into his pillow. Nutrition as punishment. Eat your torment.

Keep it out of sight.

(He remembers, eventually, the quiet details: Frank had soldiered through the standard prison fare in mechanical bites. He had always eaten efficiently, but it wasn’t the taste that had him only tolerating every meal.)

Matt heads to work ahead of the sun.

(Frank had hated to eat.)

 

 

**BROKEN LAND.**

 

 

Ryker’s adjusted to the notion of Frank Castle as a success story just before the collapse of their imaginary ecosystem and Matt and Frank’s theatrical exit from the rubble. The papers snapped at the bait: weekday op-eds pontificated that incarceration’s holistic therapy would spell the end of the Punisher.

Ryker’s PR people fatefully hovered between crisis management of the prison’s misshapen system, and cautious amazement at their own lucky break, carefully captioning photographs of the Punisher with understated silver linings. 

Exhibit A: Frank Castle paging through his book in his cell. _The Punisher granted access to the library._

Exhibit B: Frank Castle sitting docile among other inmates when the halls open to limited movement, his gaze pointed off-site. _Castle enjoying a night in._

Matt leafs through these archived papers with mounting frustration.

Foggy shoves another batch of papers with all the racket he can muster with sheaves of the Bugle and Metro, fussy. ”Some more bygones for your time,” he introduces. He leans against Matt’s desk, asking for some manner of solidarity with his unceremonious early-morning slump. 

“What have we learned from all this time-a-wasting? That the Punisher at least had his share of some thoughtful opinions around this point — not that either of us would’ve been keeping up on ‘em. But you? Ah, Matty.” Foggy winces at a bright tabloid, sets it down behind the both of them. “You were far too important. You got the TMZ treatment.”

“Looks like,” Matt mutters around the rim of his teacup.

The PR substitute stories for Matthew Murdock by and large amounted to countless retellings of his impending trial and the sordid what-ifs surrounding his plight in lieu of analyzing the reasons Matt might be causing a racket behind the bars of the most secure, secretive institution on the East Coast.

Typical. 

Matt fists a hand in his hair at the moment Foggy hums, rustles today’s paper as if to remove something caught in between the pages. He grips them to feel the crumple as a sort of comfort. He struggles to relax his shoulders, slumping them back to neutral with exactly the same tension they had been carrying before.

“Alright,” Matt says. “Share.”

“I guess the Punisher’s got some big fans,” Foggy narrates, perusing the top stories. ”Homicidal, kill-John-Lennon-type fans.”

“Incredibly unsurprising,” Matt says lightly, craning his head up to grasp a brief impression of the story on A12.

“Some hoodlums — “

“Hoodlums, Foggy?”

“Hoodlums, _thank you_ , got messy with his childhood things. I guess they dug deep, and they found — his parents’ old place, across the river. They found his old church. And they took to defiling all of it... just to have some place in the Punisher’s history.” Foggy jostles back to the cover page. “I guess the joke’s on them. It’s already defiled.”

“May I?” Matt takes the paper. He turns to A12: dark ink pictures, a fuzzy sense of a tired townhouse left over from the old immigrant boomtown days. The neighborhood told of erratic energy, limitless fractions of stories caught between the lines. Bensonhurst, Brooklyn; a river away, a world away, offering nothing to Matt. 

His city, after all, ends in a different river, and the mettle of Daredevil has lapped at the drumming of Times Square, the mad rush of Penn Station, and then receded. 

His niche has food and water, silence and chaos, and people bad and good enough for three lifetimes. He shall not want for more punch-drunk midnight conversations with grizzled grocers, or the Kitchen station housing the regulars — buskers slouched on the metal benches complaining of their endlessly stolen guitars; grinning barmen who will tell you in which old taverns the ghosts of the Five Points shiver into periphery. 

He could choke on his history and run his feet raw on the rusting old fire escapes. 

He could blanket himself under familiar anonymity and never step over the lines he had always, with immense respect, colored inside.

But then he had found page A13’s photograph of a little boy who lived the next world over, a little Brooklyn boy, stiff-backed and unsure of his own smile.

“Don’t, Matt,” Foggy groans. ”With the dwelling. The dwelling’s no good.”

“Is he smiling?” Matt’s brows knit. He extracts the outline of the boy and a taller man, finds the uniform darkness of the subject an obstacle. ”That’s an old picture they coughed up.”

“Why — ” Foggy hunches his shoulders again and hangs his head in resignation. ”Oy. Yes. Sort of. … Sort of the way you twist your mouth if you’re trying to get serious, but your nerves are getting the better of you. Nerves or happiness. It’s not a great cover-up.”

He illustrates it for himself. Boy of suppressed joy, posing with a confident priest. He’s holding a certificate awarded to him by his Sunday school. The certificate’s details had not overcome age or the photograph’s resizing for publication — what good the little boy had done could not be understood anymore. Foggy pulls the newspaper right up to his face, squints, and begins slowly reciting jumble of sounds, for all the good it does. 

This boy named Francis had lived cradled by Brooklyn’s prickling skyline. Francis must have had friends, as Matt imagined all other children had once. He must’ve had a father or mother who smilingly steered him away from harm, and, when he learned to take communion, must’ve given him a rosary with hushed instructions. 

It should never be worn. It must always be carried with you, should you ever need to call on God’s grace.

And then once, sometime between Francis’ small life lived kind and good, and his extermination of his own heart, his happiness had been buried until crushed by something that happened out of Matt’s reach, a borough away. 

A strange little entity, Francis stood under the white alabaster of a beautiful Virgin Mother. The ghostly Immaculate Heart bled for him from her high perch of dark wood, but had not come to his rescue when his darkest hour arrived.

Matt folds the paper over the photograph.

“Francis Castiglione.” Foggy punctuates his wondering commentary with a large bite of donut.

“Yeah.”

Muffled: “You already knew?”

Distant: “I’ve been on his trail long enough.”

Foggy gulps down his food. “What’re you thinking?” he asks with trepidation. 

“That I never learned what happened in Ryker’s,after you -- when it went pear-shaped. And he was there.”

“And you’re gonna go ask him to fill you in?” Foggy incredulously asks. He pulls at the paper and Matt peevishly embraces it. ”Matty, what for? It’s history. It’s done with.”

“There’re things I need to account for. I’m responsible for whatever I did, whatever the technicalities. Doesn’t matter how far back. I was there all the same.”

“It’s true, but — you have things right now, too. Things you need to account for here and now.” Foggy stares at him, searching for a hint to the riddle. “I’m asking you, why _now_ when it’s a story for back then?”

Matt shakes his head and spreads the paper out across the desk again. “Tell me what happens,” he says.

Foggy says,

The first to descend upon the scene of Frank Castle’s wasted past described a ransacked old home. The building had been assigned for demolition, abandoned after Castle’s family died out early -- identities atrophied and vanished into the fray of Long Island.

They seemed intent on losing themselves out there, answering to the ache for absolution. 

Superhero fixations, in the wake of that abuse, ensured the planned toppling of the historic structure would be evaded. Ghosts need their haunted houses. They might forget Frank Castle’s first victim was himself.

The boy in the picture had everyone fooled until he released the monster, fully-grown. His story tells of a profound darkness that ate a gentle soul.

 

+

 

(He had a book on him, a book he had always read. It smells like a loan from the musty library when Frank thumbs through it, though Matt sometimes wonders if, given the daunted silence the younger officers assume when they pass Frank’s cell, they had allowed Frank to carry in whatever Frank had wanted.

Favors do not come easily in Ryker’s.

The commissary will occasionally host vicious contests to find the winner of the last stationery set or can of pringles. The ones who do the beatings and fashion pens into weapons are the same who will savage another man for the respect and fear it inspires.

Only men who wield enough power to dismiss threat of shanks or rape are the ones with the means to smuggle in bribes the officers gorge themselves upon, gleefully.

Small victories are crowed loudly. The implicit, epidemic agonies inhabit the unspoken-for corners. Sometimes the shouting from solitary confinement reaches Matt’s ears, and Matt silently embellishes them with his father’s old ghost stories as he strokes his bruised knuckles.

Sometimes pepper spray wafts into his cell to sear his eyes shut and burn the air away.

Pain speaks in his inner ear like a charm. He uses it.)

He wakes up and wants to tear it out of himself. 

This is another difference between him and Frank: Frank had immaculately abandoned his history for his mission’s sake. 

Matt’s haunts him as a residue of unexplored interims. He hadn’t wished for this, irresponsible narratives with burnt edges. 

He had always wanted to learn how to live with himself.

He’d believed he understood this about himself, and occasionally even felt a small sense of grace in bearing his burdens, the fervor with which he possessed his failures.

Somehow, a fragment had escaped unnoticed. It blindsided him. He did not recognize the prodigal beast, until it had grown up untamed and returned to draw blood, to pulverize his account.

Matt pulls on his costume and seeks out Frank.

 

+

 

Bensonhurst, Brooklyn thrums with limitless itineraries. Colored hats vended on the corner: fezzes and yarmulkes stamped with Dodgers logos; falafel loud while it fries, Googoosh singing to fiddles next street over. 

The Italian mob left the neighborhood for dead when Frank must’ve been closing in on eighteen, and now the human traffickers out of Belgrade have taken a shine to the unassuming chaos.

Frank does not pretend to caution. Framed in the window of his gutted, ancient home, he assesses the scope of loss. The garish lights from ancient watering holes blink into the emptiness and silhouette him cartoonishly. Bay Ridge Parkway’s traffic hums a din to harmonize with the insurmountable silence Frank upholds. 

He moves boldly against wood and dusk in pitch, like a chimney sweep. And he would make an easy checkpoint for Matt to spring for, were the night any other.

“Your name’s a dead giveaway, Castiglione,” Matt announces as he deftly invites himself in through a shattered window. He perches on the frame. ”Damned if you hadn’t been born and raised in Bensonhurst.”

“Not completely, Hell’s Kitchen,” Frank murmurs, shoving a battered cherrywood chest of drawers away from the wall in a smooth swipe. Behind the chest: peeling wallpaper and more dust. And a small lace doily. ”Italians were all en route to Manhattan Beach by the time I was ten.”

The magazine abandoned on the floor is about hot rods. It’s an issue from last week, printed on low-quality paper — no family heirloom. Evidence, if only the police had the motivation to do their work. 

But all those scattered cogs and wheels and screws from a smashed antique clock, only Frank could know whose schedules they once accounted for. Copper angles glint dirtily and strike against Frank’s steel-toed boots when the two meet.

“Mob’s work?” Matt volunteers.

Frank removes the depleted drawers; they drop to the floor in hollow clunks. ”Too ashamed to stay once this neighborhood birthed Sbarro.”

Matt smiles. Catches himself. Finds his jumpy curiosity may be easily diagnosed as apprehension, and attentively steps through the bygones littering the floor. 

“What are you doing here, Frank?”

Frank cracks open the back of the red-toned chest with a jerk of his elbow. The violence in that moment would startle anyone else. The wood crunches inward. Matt takes a step back, belated, as the chest rocks forward perilously. 

When it rattles back to rest, Frank gropes into the shallow recess. The splinters snag like thorns on his utility gloves, friction and lines zipping into the coarse fabric.

Exposed stacks of bills glare in his black-clad grip, when he pulls his hands free. He sets them to his side; their make is new, crisp.

“Aha,” Matt says for the both of them. 

“Crime moved off the streets,” Frank confirms after another moment of scooping out well-hidden cash. “Been booming in this living room.”

And then from the hole he delivers, with the same detached expectancy, a small, tied batch of photographs and a prayer card. He lets them drop by his knees, disinterested.

Matt closes in and bends low to brush drywall off of one of the aged pictures. He reads the shape of the textures.

A family dressed in Sunday finest — steadfast stares and arms all locked together like a display of defiance. Olive skin, unsmiling? There’s the shape of the boy: Francis is center stage. His hair has been laboriously pomaded and combed to the side, dark and severe; nothing left to chance, nothing out of place. Well-loved boy, obedient enough to sit still through one of childhood’s more tortuous experiences.

“Your parents?” Matt asks. With his fingers, he searches for meaning in the dehydrated colors: a middle-aged woman’s prominent nose, a crucifix on the wall; once, before it was smashed and the memories exiled, there must have been glass proudly protecting this portrait. 

“So you look like your mother.” He pauses, silence pregnant as he collects a few more observations, but then Frank turns his head suddenly, impatient and crouched inside the one rectangle of cleared floor where the chest once stood. 

He regards Matt with the restlessness of a caged carnivore. They are too close to be civil. The chemical bleed-out fumes of a new kevlar vest are pungent on Frank. Behind that, gunpowder and burnt paper — the familiar scope of Frank’s scent.

“Your turn,” Frank tells him.

Matt’s stance changes. ”What I’m doing here? I haven’t seen you since Ryker’s.”

Frank does not waste movement: measured, sturdy, he rises only to kick his heel into the hardwood floor. The wide oak floorboards give way in a succinct crack, already devastated by termites. Frank digs. 

The floor, scarred and splintering, was once given its due polishing, its careful attention.

No shoes on in the house.

An irritable sense of the unexplained knots in Matt’s stomach. ”I’m the only one who pays you visits anymore.” His declaration flattens against the array of damage strewn across the living space. Outside, Matt notes two karaoke bars somewhere close piping out their musics of vastly different genres, and the volume frays the common racket of a weeknight, gives Matt cause to itch.

“The others took a hint.”

Matt presses forward. ”We had our time together at Ryker’s.”

Frank stills again, darkly. Before Frank thrusts his hand under the floorboards, he gives Matt two terse seconds. He spares a moment for absolute quiet, for Matt.

God in Heaven. That pale panic. 

The unspoken thing rolling in Matt’s stomach threatens to sink him into the abused floor.

“Castle,” he barrels in. ”I don’t remember things I might’ve done.”

Frank promptly lowers himself to the floorboards, feeling out the black pit he has fathered, his chest pressed to wood. His hair, longer now than the last time Matt had noticed, feathers against the floor when he glances up to Matt, remote again.

“I need to know who I wronged, and how,” he drags himself through clear enunciation. 

He seeks out any change in Frank’s habits, his control and poise — a taut pull or hesitation. His jaw is tense, but isn’t it always. His palms encourage the dark to give itself over to him, beckoning to what hides in the unseen spaces. Every inch of him dedicated to something else.

“I need to know what you know. If there’s anything I need to atone for.” Listen. “And I’m asking you, because you would tell me if I ever —. Because you’re everything that I detest, Castle. You’re all of that. But you’re not a liar.”

Frank had never found use in words.

His words, instead, fragment and fray with inertia. He knows the shape Frank’s lips make, the way they only just move. 

He has made a life of discretion, deferring announcements to the violence that tails him, letting them speak their foreign language on behalf of his own body, with its primal urge to communicate. His body serves as a vessel for wreckage. That is all Frank is.

His words operate on little more than a breath; he doesn’t intertwine speech with work like this, right now. They are sharp in their focus; they are meant only for Matt to hear, and Matt anticipates them with a drying mouth.

“Nothing.”

Matt waits for a beat.

Frank moves. Demolition stitched into every decision.

“— You’re going to give me more than ‘nothing,’ Castle.”

Frank reaches deep below the floorboards of his home; his exhale is a smoke signal, undulating dust and drywall from the floor. “Nothing,” he says, clipped, “worth knowing.”

“No,” Matt tells him. “That’s not enough.” He towers above Frank and thinks of kicking him into the murk, letting him die underground with his forgotten happy memories. He thinks of stopping him in his tracks right here, while he’s ducking his head under to glimpse if any fractals of himself had smothered under the weight of the foundations.

“You’d even know when’s enough?” Frank extends his grasp, plunging his fist with a grip tailored for a grenadier -- and delivers them with methodical expectation, four old grenades, and then a glock, followed by heavy accessories; ammo belts glinting like costume jewelry, coilguns and a twin M16 to match Frank’s, and other, unseen giants that Frank’s knuckles tap against curtly as he susses out the extent of the hideaway. 

“I don’t, so how about you tell me what you know. Can you do that this once? Can you be straight with me?”

“You were in a state of mania.”

Matt circles round him, pursuing Frank’s gaze until it responds to his. “Yes, and I know why. But that doesn’t excuse a damn thing and you know it,” he barks. “I want answers. That’s all I came here for. But if you’re looking to — “

“You’re clean, Murdock.”

“That’s for you to judge? Really?”

Smoke signals; nostrils as smoking barrels. Hair growing toward another trim that he will give himself. The scrape of Frank’s boots against aged junk when he moves to stand, the sightless way he pats drywall from his pants, but it still dusts across his thigh rigs. This is his response.

His fist disguises a hand grenade until he turns his wrist and shows Matt the one piece of his home he’s salvaging.

Matt straightens himself to hide the swell of another sort of apprehension.

“Sympathetic detonation. Sweeps out the clutter.” He thumbs the safety lever, almost teasing. He then cocks his head toward the window. “M.O.”

Matt roots himself in place, resentful. “So destroying whatever’s left of your old life is your Plan A. You’re a piece of work, Castle. I shouldn’t be surprised -- I’m just disappointed I wasted my time trying to appeal to your humanity.”

Frank stands as a tower of absolute calm, mouth a neutral border to his apathetic interior. The sheer force of his body’s loyalty to its barren purpose leaves no room for betrayal.

Matt plucks the prayer card from its neglect and wipes it clean. The Madonna reveals herself, her head inclined in soft submission to the Lord’s mysterious ways, her hands offering comfort as effortlessly as they would broken bread. 

The signature on the back, lower-right, is Francis Castiglione’s, written in ball-point pen with the tremor of one attempting his finest-yet penmanship. Below it, a phone number with the neighborhood’s outdated area code; he’d etched it confidently into the card.

“Our Mother of Perpetual Help,” he says, under his breath. He jabs the card toward Frank. “Here.”

“Leave it.”

“To _burn_.” And then, half-embarrassed by his own doddering superstition: “I’d keep it, but you already christened it your own.”

He lets compulsion master him and closes in on Frank again, unarmed but for the Virgin. 

“And I remember the prayer.”

He seems to remember having confronted the impression of Frank’s face, the unrepentant angle of his jaw and the curve of his nostrils, the Roman bridge of his nose to his dark brows, and his well-trained hands coated in the scent of rust — all of this, a sudden epiphany of another life in which he must have had different chances, but lived out the same choices.

It snatches at his ease of movement like barbed wire. He leans in and, with more force than intended, presses the card into Frank’s pocket to be done with it. 

Frank does not move, nor does he give any indication that he expected any less of Matt and this leap of faith. He is burnt paper, arid and apathetic.

Matt entertains the prospect of a draw. He regards Frank, silence strung between them in earnest now, some strange embellishment to the tense little box they’ve drawn up about themselves. All the intimacy of their concurrence to one another, and Frank is still miles away.

“There are a lot of things I wish I knew.”

Through the utility gloves, Frank is feeling along the deep grooves of his grenade with the pad of his thumb.

“But what good is it chasing after the answers when the wrong people are holding them. I’m beginning to think you and I don’t even comprehend words the same way.”

“We don’t,” Frank says.

Matt feels himself leaking something vital out, stoppers it with a stiff step backward. He’s making to leave. He’s making to give up on Frank here and now. “Only because you won’t let us.”

What eats at him is what keeps him here, that’s all. That, and this house, where perhaps in a cookie jar or behind the embroidered scripture on the wall, some ghost of Frank’s desecrated trajectory would reveal itself to the two of them, if only they could drag themselves away from each other for long enough to look around.

“ _‘I hear thee called the refuge and hope of sinners; be therefore my refuge and hope.’_ ” Matt stills his tongue, lets the consecration drift on the muddy nighttime sound. “Did you ever feel a thing, saying that?”

“No." Frank picks at the safety pin. "Saint Joseph always seemed more willing to put in the work.”

Matt opens his mouth.

Frank beats him: “Punch out.”

The safety pin clinks delicately against the floor and Frank drops the grenade into the dark pit. 

Matt dives out the window, and seconds later the explosion heralds in several simultaneous earthquakes, and the sound rocks up against Matt’s senses and bulldozes them. His hands smack against the the sidewalk and he scrambles wildly to his feet, wanting to take off, just fly. 

Civilians. Busy Brooklyn. 

Dammit.

Matt steals behind still-rattling neighborhood dumpsters, but catches no hint of anyone caught in the assault, no spritz of perfume or cigarette or groan of terror. 

He careens around the block and up, a hop and a running launch and the snap of cable, swinging up to the top of a vegan bakery. It’s only then that the people come running to see, calling each other out to observe the black husk fuming at the block’s end. Cooked skeleton, no room and board for ghosts anymore. 

He hears Frank Castle’s name on their lips, hushed and low, partnered by impressed whistles. It’s over. Anyone hurt? No one. No witnesses, no one to feel the vicious eruption.

Well-timed. Well done.

The smoke clears with the advent of the fire department. The crowds mill about, and a couple of men in Mets jerseys pick through debris, toss something indeterminate between each other like it’s still burning.

Now he catches Frank’s scent, or he thinks. Somewhere in this maze is Lazarus, the force of the explosion in flesh, the one thing to survive the disaster and live to tell the tale.

But no one is telling anyone anything anymore.

 

+

 

Ecology has only ever been a pet theory. No piece of the world sits down learn how to work in sync, nothing and no one fits together so beautifully as they’d have you believe.

The truth is, harmony can frighten. Something to fit to hide in skin; memorize its touch, remember where you felt it, and how it clicked with a sinful simplicity. 

Remember it, impress the memory into muscles. Let the agreement be intuitive, unspoken.

He had shoved up against Frank in his extended mania. He remembers that — edges filling the burning racket — thuds screams and scores settled through genpop. Concrete and everyone a phantom, the way they roam still shackled.

And he does not know what happened. He does not even remember himself. He does not remember having a body to move against Frank.

Save that Frank’s shoulders had been unyielding; his knees were definite. His thighs were irrefutable. 

And yet, he had felt the architecture of bones.

Frank Castle could be fragile, perhaps. Perhaps, in the ways that fractures can transform into crawlspaces. In the way that it can take time to distinguish want from compulsion. 

He does not remember thinking this.

He remembers having forgotten himself.

 

 

**HART ISLAND.**

 

 

For Frank’s first test, the corrections officers gave him a plum assignment. A convict whose number began with nine speculated that the wardens wanted to take a measure of the fight in Frank, before they even entertained the notion of slowly beating him into submission, smashing him down into just another murderer.

Or maybe it was that they wanted a show, to see Frank’s brute strength in action, to watch him struggle and squint with all the rest of the burial crew. Maybe they would get a scuffle out of it, down in the trenches with the dead as witness.

Maybe they wanted a chuckle; maybe they wanted poetic justice; maybe they wanted to be awe-inspired.

They bussed Frank out with the other select few, all fitted in angles into an over-crowded bus, en route to Hart Island. 

Matt listened to Frank leave with the rest, while the COs screamed to fucking stay in lines of two, fucking keep their mouths shut. 

“Punisher’s gone to reap the fruits of his labor,” someone cracks, drawing near from down the cold hall. “Lucky fucker. I’d dig a hole for every single motherfuckin’ coffin they had, if they let me go.”

Matt turns, slowly. Hanging in his doorway, palpably smug. Familiar aura: one of Barracuda’s, isn’t he. The sort of cannon fodder that doesn’t recognize its own nature. Cannon fodder spits into Matt’s cell and prepares for a second shot. “Must get spooky, all alone without your guard dog on your duty.”

“Guard dog,” Matt echoes.

“Yeah,” he croons. “But we all gotta lose the security binkies sometime. Good thing you got a world of enemies outside your door waiting for you to come out an’ play.” 

He swings on into Matt’s cell. He’s wearing brass knuckles, vintage. Absolutely useless outside of a brawl where no one’s looking and no one grasps the gravity of the word stakes. “You’ll never be alone, Murdock,” he seethes, barreling forward.

“There’s no one here,” Matt corrects him. He whips his elbow into this stranger’s temple, driving him backward into the steel door frame with an unholy smash that rings through the metal and into Matt’s teeth.

The man crumples with a ghastly scream and a bright flash of blood. Matt lowers his fist, chewing his tongue. Loud; too brutal a strike for these hours.

The medics and a nervous guard check him right there in Matt’s doorway for a major concussion while they surmise his eye socket has been cracked.

Matt sits on his bed with an affected listlessness; and he doesn’t take questions, because the answers lie there with his short-term victim and in the silence. 

He thinks, he would have finally done it, if not for the sound. He would’ve wrenched the life away from anyone here, here in the meandering afternoon with slats of sunlight streaming past all the bars.

That’s the thing. It’s too easy, too easy to merely make hurt and take life. It’s a skill to be honed, to be made into something more than these men, than this man dragged bodily away to the infirmary, can accomplish. 

There is a basic procedure to it -- to finally setting the story to rest. And if he manages it, he will have finally left himself.

He considers it fondly, like a prayer he answered on his own, all alone.

Hours later, Frank must be coming back soon, but Matt stops wondering when Frank will lurk there in the periphery of his awareness, and stops filling his time with plans for retribution, because the Nutraloaf arrives again and Matt hides himself away.

No one here.

 

+

 

The sun is setting, a chill catching in the scrubby landscape, but Frank still pauses to wipe the sweat from his forehead, hair damp on the back of his neck. 

The last coffins have been gruffly unloaded from the dump-truck, children- and infant-sized this round. The crew has begun slowing, perching on the coffins and unzipping their jumpsuits for the cool breeze, stowing away their shovels under the captain’s grudging eye.

The Potter’s Field stretches interminably forward, past the tractors and the trucks and the pine coffins sitting neglected but for a crew member’s crayon scratch of identification:

Child under 7 years, Kanoria. Child under 4, unidentified. Infant, New York University Hospital. 

Frank had read all of their unheard names. He read every one he handled, from his station in the deep trench they’d all dug out, accepting what wooden boxes, couple feet long, his crew lowered down to him.

Distinctly he thought, he had enjoyed reading when he was this small girl’s age. He’d made his first diorama for science class when he’d been his boy’s age.

He gripped each coffin and read each testament. 

He sought the children’s rightful places among their brothers and sisters, the tidy families he gave them in rows of five.

First level of five, second, third. They became a fortress even so far down in the earth, the soft soil; they learned to climb together. They built.

And then Frank climbed out of their great, full grave, grabbing at the loose ground and smelling rain in it, his sinews pulling and aching with all-day interment. 

Now, he takes his shovel in his raw hands, unused to using them bare. Had forgotten the way metal warms so eagerly against skin; at his first plunge of the shovel deep into the yielding earth, the rest of the crew rise and follow suit. 

“We pray for ‘em?” one man asks the captain.

The Potter’s Field spans disinterest a hundred acres long. The low, waterless grass grows weak and the shrubs are all colored with dust. Small, speechless white monuments to the communities created on the spot and buried together spike up from the ground like displaced bones.

The captain drinks this in, familiar with it. “No one’s here to listen.”

They dash the fresh wood coffins with dirt. They blanket them. Finally, at last, they blot them out.

The dark tucks them in to rest.

By flashlight, they board the bus and leave the island alone. Some men fall asleep, some stare somberly out the window. They look, where they sit, as if they’re capturing a moment’s reprieve on a small coffin, remembering they are breathing.

They arrive home late. The halls glare with explosive noise, chaos constant and near-boiling.

Frank has been counting since he arrived. A few more degrees, he thinks. 

Before the showers, the captain doles out the pay his crew earned for burials, fifty cents per hour. Frank takes his money to commissary, buys cotton surgical masks. 

He listens to the after-action boasts, Ryker’s headline stories for the day, as he moves undisturbed through his limited space in the microcosm, all of New York City shoved into a single cell block.

After the showers. 

Lights dim, the tension rises. The weight hangs solid.

Frank muscles past it with measured menace, a shudder at the edge of view, unforeseen but by Matt.

He gives the surgical masks to Matt, and Matt straps one on and pushes himself mechanically forward with his new-found strength.

“You understand the way things work here,” Matt says after a moment’s terse reflection. He turns his head toward Frank, barely, as he steadily takes stock of tonight’s target’s whereabouts, and his own place amid the riotous din. “We know ‘thanks’ doesn’t cut it here.”

Every man’s eyes on Frank but Matt’s. 

He notices Matt tilting his head the way he does when he’s sensing, but gingerly now. The smell of cemetery dirt on Frank. Soap and cemetery dirt.

“What do you want from me, Frank?”

Scuttling down the way, Hammerhead’s cronies, whatever they may look like, despicable and desperate to be rid of them both: the expectation beats down mercilessly, but it will wait for him, he commands it. He controls this fragile ecosystem. This ant farm. He could tear it down like curtains, remodel every fragment that ever stood in his and Foggy and Milla and Frank’s way; no. Why. He could start blank and light and happy again and redefine “justice” to earn it some worth again, engineer Frank another path -- easy as putting spin on a story, easy as --

Frank glances up to a vantage point on the second floor. 

“Breathe,” he only says.

Matt turns to face him, expression half-hidden behind his mask. ”Don’t belittle me.”

Frank leaves him swiftly as Hammerhead’s brigade draw near; he climbs to higher ground where he does the unknown work he followed Matt to do. 

Frank doesn’t announce himself tonight or any other. He is a shudder calling forth silence at first sight. 

And Matt, he waits. He listens after Frank, before his absence is all Matt knows him by. He finds Frank’s rhythm, how steadfast, how soft, and tries to match him before the noise reaches fever-pitch. 

In the pause before he begins again, he remembers how Frank and he have survived thus far, in spite of themselves.

Inhale. 

Hurt. Palm to forehead, focus. 

Exhale.

It’s a drill, a skill. To breathe. Just like this, like this, like this.

 

 

**WORDS, WORDS.**

 

 

Exhibit C: Matt alone in the yard, up against the chain-links. He is waiting for someone out of view. _Matthew Murdock, the lone wolf vs. the wolf pack?_

Ask any kid in any borough what the best toy a boy can have is, and he’ll say an old mattress. Old cushions. Anything that can break your fall.

People toss these things out if you are lucky enough to live in a neighborhood with no sense of decorum. 

Ask Matt Murdock. The best thing a boy can do is alight on the rail of his ancient fire escape and escape his building: prop yourself on the edge, teeter, and fall. Fall like you mean to die. Fall with faith.

Land like a gymnast from your parents’ Old World. Watch the smoke that rises interminably from the streets in the dome above your head. The tall hues of the sky, the knowledge that they are deepening hour after hour.

“Any dreams of flying?”

Frank uses his dinner tray in lieu of knife hand. He sets his cup of water on the table, and suddenly jolts the tray into the neck of some grinning big tattoo who could be a white supremacist if Matt cared to muddle through the fine print covering his skin; the bravado in his step meant he’d meant to recruit Matt or to stir up vintage anti-Italian sentiment. The tray snaps against the carotid artery -- a stun, almost inhumane were Frank not restrained. The man crumples, wheezes, and retreats in a stagger to save face.

Frank sits next to him. This is the only reason why there aren’t lines of convicts before the both of them, waiting to assail or offer conditional refuge. Frank sits next to him. Matt sits next to Frank. Semantics lost their value, no one remembers how to listen to words. Maybe Frank is to blame for this habit; maybe Matt had invited it. They sit together.

The ROTC marched on past Matt throughout secondary school. Captain America stopped suggesting the Avengers to him after he bristled so many times at the thought of coordinating anguish. Luke and Danny complained he kept trying to steal into stranger territory even after all the coasts had cleared, don’t be a stranger, Matt.

But he sits by Frank.

Frank sits by him.

Matt is certain, with some frosted satisfaction, that in this moment, they both must be sharing the strange recognition of their symbiosis. How in this place where you must struggle and brutalize your way into the care of others, they don’t need anyone else. 

The corrections officers watch them, or they don’t. Frank thinks. He holds his breath, a small quietude devoted to consideration Matt has never received from Frank before, and Matt thinks he must be remembering something from a long time ago. 

“Never wished for wings.”

Just impossible height, years above the places where you could fall and fall and fall and then never climb out again.

 

+

 

He was never a storyteller; something in the genes forgot about tradition, and he was left with the burden of proof of his heritage. No limericks. No fresh reflection.

Here is a story: if you’re a good soldier you’ll be a bad civilian.

Here is a story: love is trusting that something that can kill you will not.

Here is the only story that Frank ever tells him: he knows Matt invokes Mary Magdalene.

“Leave her alone, Devil,” Frank says. “Atonement turns into self-pity real quick.”

What does he say? Sometimes he can’t recall his own tirades, seeking to move into Frank’s line of view, bypassing the hurdles and architectural obstacles to slow Frank down. Frank moves swiftly, at angles, ducked and low to the ground. Jaguar crawl. Bear crawl. 

Matt follows him down to the dredges, where in his costume he feels disoriented and hunched amid the overfilled dumpsters and Frank’s KABAR, drawn and glinting thirstily. He evades streetlights and the slash of metal like something clipped and flightless and acclimating, but slowly.

He meets Frank.

He feels the spike of Frank’s heartbeat in the arches of his feet as he slams Frank against the side of his car, the force enough to knock the hunting rifle out of his grasp to fall to the asphalt.

Hand free, Frank takes a swing -- Matt blocks with ease, but Frank has prepared for the next reprimand, the sweep of a foot to knock him down. He wants him pinioned, useless under the advantage of weight. Quicker to resort to such brutality with Matt this time. 

His target is leaving the transaction point, a man in a hurry to leave Battery Park. Success -- almost.

Hardly. Slipping a pistol from its holster.

“You finally gonna make good on your word?” A snap back -- he means to pistol-whip Matt, ugly tactics to spark something ferocious in Matt. Matt retreats -- launches forward, back-springs over Frank’s head and alights on the top of Frank’s car, crouched.

“First I give you your chance, Frank -- “

“No. Hurt me.”

He hurts him. He levels him with a fierce show of fists and a billy club to the temple, before Frank can level him Billy club to the temple. Frank flat on his back, but the soles of his boots already scrabbling and kicking off the dirty street to curl reflexively in.

Bleeding. Good.

Taste of blood blooms on his tongue just after Frank’s nose collides with the asphalt, and the jittery sound the knots of agony make as Frank tenses and composes himself (disarming, the sound of pain) before shoving up against Matt gives him a sick little thrill in his stomach. 

He looks at the blood, he thinks these things, and then the fire rings out. A couple well-placed shots, snarling at the dumpsters near their heads. Not alone. Never alone. 

They spring away from each other and to the fight that matters now. Only later Matt can trace the scent and the trail of blood to find where Frank succeeded in two-fifths of his mission. Two down before the police apprehended Matt’s neatly presented lackeys. Frank, with clean icy precision, had taken the man he’d come to this dirty street to take.

Matt follows the scent of blood away from Battery Park, scoping from buildings, floating above the city noise. 

“We need to stop doing this,” he calls down to the sullen corner between a closed bakery and an old record shop. 

Tires splash murky puddles. The stench of dead vermin waft slowly skyward. The catch of damp, of spring rain on the way.

What a mess he’s made.

“I spend a lot of time running after the things I abhor. I don’t win, I don’t lose. Neither do you. Sometime, sometime very soon, it won’t be enough. This isn’t eternal, us going in circles. Just -- orbiting each other. Something here’s going to give, Castle. Something’s going to give out.”

“This your concession speech?”

Just making sure.

“Who the hell do you think I am?”

Matt can feel it under his costume, layering his skin. Frank is pleased.

And it isn’t good to be back simply because nothing in him lived to tell the tale of that brief before. ‘Return’ never existed. It was burnt to ash one day and dissolved in the East River.

Matt wipes at Frank’s blood on his arm.

The sight is dismal, Matt remotely recollects from a cold reading of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead he and Foggy had affected a number of years back, late-night cram session together in their dorm room. Fingers flying over the braille, falling out of character and into laughter. He’d been Rosencrantz. Dreamy lunatic. Sad to be a supporting character, only because he’d felt more multitudinous than this. He thought he could carry just a little more.

Oh God, Matt. Said Foggy, breaking out of Guildenstern abruptly. I can’t explain it, but in this crazy awful way you were made to be --

Stop-slander-slander, Matt had yelled, muffling Foggy with his book.

When they’d finally talked Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of their misery, he became the Ambassador to assess the scope of the bloodshed.

He made the announcement: they had killed their own characters. They shucked off these coils to become victorious Norwegian princes and secret-keepers to the late prince of Denmark. They rose mighty and vibrant and they forgot who they had lived before.

Maybe that’s how all stories are supposed to end.

The next day Matt returns to the dreary alleyways, needing to know the coast was clear as it felt before, after the last gasp of chaos settled. The rain has cleansed away the scent of decay, for the moment.

He finds a little square of paper where Frank had stood, eyes gazing up at him, asking him would he give in (the nerve of him; it’s insane; it’s unexpected; that he would expend all those terrifying energy to conjecture will Matt call the end, it means something; it doesn’t mean anything actually; there’s nothing; and that’s all). Caught in the still deep puddle and doused hopelessly in rainwater for hours. It has begun to soften into silt, the picture on it unrecognizable, the ball-point ink name on the backside diluted into a grey dreamy smear.

But Matt remembers shapes. He imagines himself drawing the prayer card out of the water before it vanishes into the muck, and having another reason to find Frank and seek out his pocket.

Frank learns the prayer. He learns another trajectory, outside of Saint Joseph’s single-minded determination. Imbibe your punishment. Kill your passion for purpose. 

\-- No. Really, no more. Set down the poison. Hand to heart, you’re not alone. Do you hear me? You were never on your own. We don’t have to be any of this. We could just stay here, or run away. We can do any of those things, if you want to. If you’ll let me.

He kneels down and skims the water with his fingertips, but he recoils as if seared. The Virgin will tear if he touches her now. She’ll drift to pieces. He was too late to save her, to carry her across a foreign river and make Frank promise, hand-to-heart, to care. Better to leave her suspended in her holy water, lamenting his new failure.

He can carry a couple more.

That’s all.

 

 

**FIRE ESCAPE.**

 

 

Exhibit D: Frank’s face obscured by his book. 

_Above: Castle’s closest ally in Ryker’s is Edna St. Vincent Millay._

 

+

 

They made napkin roses, the do-rags a couple cells down. They made them once the corrections officers dealt the pain more quickly, sweetly. This happens when the COs get tired, maybe once a season, and figure they know the convict’s donkey mind well enough to spot a wave of rebellion.

Save, they can never know how desperate, how hungry, the deprived can be.

Using a battery and foil, they sparked a flame in the common area. Ceremoniously, they whooped and lit their roses, made them into vivid torches and added ‘arsonist’ to their rap sheets.

They, because there was no telling who was in on it -- it was a unified sigh of misery from the grunts, the lowest on the rung. Fisk or Hammerhead’s or Hydra’s -- they burnt away their labels in the quick flash of hell they unleashed. It was a worthless bit, a sideshow at best -- but it opened the cell doors and stole the stasis from the officers.

They pick the smallest ones to beat. Matt dashes from his cell unrecognized, hated names rattling in his ribcage, recited on pulsating air heating with flames.

They pick the smallest ones to beat.

That little pile of nothing who’d stopped dreaming of girls way back, he didn’t know how to take the precious bit of foil from a gum wrapper. He’d never known how to hurt. But they picked the smallest ones to beat.

Matt watches two officers take him down and plan to string him up as an example. They break his teeth while the other inmates rail against the other officers or dodge flames in the corners, smoking up the end of the corridor. They drive his head into the linoleum floor -- and again. They kick. All along, here they were.

Here they are, his enemies.

Matt smells cemetery dirt.

He turns backward on his heel and swings at Frank, grapples at him and snatches a pistol away after Frank has just acquired it from some middleman modeling himself as a miniature Fisk -- he grabs it and cocks it. He aims it first at the officer who snaps a boot into the inmate’s throat, even after he’s done defending himself. 

The only limit is how fast he can pull this trigger. He’s never exercised his trigger finger. He’ll give it a trial run.

The strength he must apply to pull the trigger offers a small window of time wherein his innocence still exists, wherein Frank delivers a steely cut to Matt’s arm and he drops the weapon. He shoves Matt against the wall, where the inmates who count down their years until parole try their damnedest to wait out the mayhem, silent creatures but for the confusion on their faces.

Matt throws Frank a roundhouse kick. He can’t do this, not under these lights. He dives for the gun, wrestles it out from under an oblivious officer adding another helping hand to the murder, but that’s when he hisses and almost drops the thing again. 

Frank twists his arm against his chest, pulls him into an immobilizing waist lock and drags him away. The toes of Matt’s shoes squeak against the floor until he staggers forward, combative, clutching the gun still like it means absolution.

“You hypocrite,” he seethes, battered against the running inmates and the brawls they pass as Frank insists on the laundry room, abandoned and cleared. “You hypocrite. You fucking hypocrite. Hypocrite.”

Frank applies a sturdy forearm to the back of Matt’s neck, keeps him progressing, all throughout the haze of unchecked smoke and the happy or terrified whoops and shouts of inmates. The inmates unseeingly crash into them. Someone breaks Frank’s toe; he hears the sickening little snap covered under his shoes and his socks but he feels the pause while Frank accepts the pain, and he knows Frank cannot be all machine. Outside them: the maelstrom. Voices:

They’re not gonna

Where is

Take the

They’re

It

“You fucking hypocrite.” He realizes that he’s shaking. Pretends he doesn’t notice.

Frank shuts the door. It is a wonder that there are doors to close. It is a wonder Matt hasn’t turned the gun on Frank. Rage is not learned. It is the origin.

Frank shuts the door and Matt spins Frank back against it, and closes his hands on Frank’s throat. The gun drops. It goes off this time, denting a washing machine. Matt’s hands press, hands shuddering claws that grasp and ease and press again.

For a moment, Frank’s brows knit like he wonders if Matt will do it, he’ll strangle him and that will be the end.

Then Frank backhands Matt across his face. “Murdock,” he commands.

“You _hypocrite_.”

His mouth tastes bright with blood. His glasses clatter onto the floor.

“I'm with you,” Matt says through his teeth. He shoves Frank down to the floor. Frank takes him along, dragging him again with those peerless arms and undeniable force. 

But Matt pins him because Frank lets him, and reaches above the slumped pile they make for the gun. Frank draws him back by the collar of his undershirt, and Matt’s hands clamp around Frank’s neck again. His fingernails crescent into his skin. “Who else can say that? Who else, Frank? You hypocrite, _I'm here with you_.”

“No,” Frank says. He swallows, jugular bobbing tersely against Matt’s palms. “You're gone.”

Matt moves his bruised mouth against Frank’s. He ducks his head down to convince him, their teeth clicking together with the force of the kiss. Slouched down against the door, Frank accepts the kiss, willful heated thing, keeping still until Matt tightens his grip around Frank’s neck; in the wake of the pain, Frank sits up despite Matt’s weight on him and Matt slips into his lap. He hears the dull thud of the backs of Frank's bare arms against the vibrating metal door as though he were preparing himself to answer the next crisis.

Matt straddles his lap, licking into his mouth. He lowers himself against Frank, the thick scent of his own need inexplicable. Frank doesn’t stop him. He doesn’t stop anything; he could. He doesn't. He can but he won't. He could. Instead he receives Matt, his gaze on him palpable.

That pale panic. Matt ruts himself against Frank, hips to hips, arching his back as he bites fervently at Frank’s lip. Does Frank taste blood? Does it remind him of the outside, when the only proof of where you’ve been is a stain that smells and tastes like Matt?

He crushes Frank’s throat completely and grinds against him. Frank swallows again, and there’s no telling if his eyes are shut or focused on the ceiling or still watching Matt’s expression change. But he swallows, and that’s all, and that’s all it takes to make Matt kiss him again, dirty and deep. 

Frank touches his hair and then pulls. Reels him in close. Catch and release.

He releases his neck, hands pressing against sternum, fingers curling on the collar of Frank’s white undershirt. Someone’s blood spattered on it -- his own, he realizes, licking at the corner of his mouth. 

He feels Frank going hard and full under his trousers when he rolls his hips up; it makes him shudder and want and want and want just as angry voices thunder closer to the laundry room, and then begin to fade into the unintelligible clamor.

Matt rests a hand over the hollow of Frank’s throat. Frank rests his hands on Matt’s thighs, and they tighten like a vice around Frank’s lap and, somehow the more breathless of the two, he kisses him again. Frank's hipbones jut into Matt. It almost aches, and Matt seeks out the other sources of pain -- Frank's prominent, bruised collarbone that his sensitive fingertips glide across, seeking messages scratched into skin that only he can translate. A vulnerability above the bone where he can infer the artery, the stifled tremors of Frank's racing heart. The hair feathering across his forehead, disheveled. The way he wonders if Frank will make a sound.

They establish an urgent, artless cycle: Frank pulls Matt in and their hips move against each other, friction, hands squeeze around the neck, go slack so Frank breathes heavily, pull, friction, squeeze, breathe, pull, friction squeeze breathe.

A sound escapes Matt. His voice breaks -- smoke in his lungs, or

He squeezes and Frank’s hips move and then Frank sucks in air only because Matt lets him. Matt swoons over him, panting in Frank’s ear, smelling cemetery dirt. The smell of arousal, the smell of soil instead of smoke. That’s it that’s

Matt’s shoulders hunch when he leans in to lock his mouth against Frank’s to taste his own blood there. Frank’s heels scuff with anticipation against the floor and Frank’s head tilts, hair rasping against the door, and Matt wants to know how this should feel, how it could feel if

He releases Frank’s neck and supports himself with hands on Frank’s shoulders as he frots himself against him, and Frank holds Matt by the crude fabric of his uniform, asking. His pulse turns into an alarm and his hands falter before he grips Matt's ass and demands him close. It twists hot in Matt and he almost

Then Frank pants hard and fitful, just once, and bucks up against him before he restrains himself. 

Matt hits his fists against the door and holds himself taut above Frank and he makes a noise in Frank’s ear and in a shiver, in a drowning brief moment that wracks him straight to his bones, that almost hurts that begs him to curl in on himself with the feeling he feels the fact of skin and movement that claws down his spine he

He hides his face against Frank’s hair instead.

A screech, industrial, out in the corridor -- barricade, something threatening. Someone protesting, profanity-strewn. It grew quiet, steady but definite. A slow tally of every inmate and their status; how many killed in the inevitable chaos, unfortunate givens.

Finality.

Frank moves, legs shifting against the back of Matt’s thighs, insinuation. Matt wills himself up, off him and steps around him as he pulls his stained shirt straight. He smells like who he's been with.

Opening the door, Frank presses the back of his hand to his forehead, then cards back his hair.

His voice scratches with discord. “Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen at most.”

And he leaves.

They don’t leave together. 

Nothing ends in together.

Matt discerns the dim smoke-misted room with clean, blank-smelling laundry. The only other living thing: the pistol on the floor.

There are many things he could do right now, with a just hands and a glock.

He sits back down on the uninvolved floor and picks it up. It registers this time that it’s heavier than he would have assumed.

He presses the barrel against his temple, his heart, just to feel. He slides his finger to the trigger. 

His hand passes the length of the glock and its impersonal cold.

The magazine slips out first. He sets it in front of him. The chamber extends, empty. He digs his fingers in the grooves, pressures, pulls the slide off. He takes out the recoil spring, and removes the barrel.

The snaps out the firing pin. He lifts out the small safety, the locking block. He uses the screws from his glasses to disassemble the frame of the gun. He extracts pins. He pulls out the trigger.

He places the pieces on the floor. He erases the gun completely.

He sets every piece down. He remembers their shape and he breathes.


End file.
